What is the value of Experience Mapping?
This article was originally published on Zoopla design blog
When I moved to London three years ago I was overwhelmed and, to be completely honest, getting lost at least once a day. I learned the hard way never to leave my phone at home; I was completely dependant on GPS and my phone’s map! I remember how amused I was when I realised Moorgate is just next to Barbican and that I can walk from Shoreditch to Old Street in only 10 minutes.
Maps are great. Not only do they tell you how to get from point A to B but they also show you where you are and the relationships between the spots around you. Experience maps are no different. They capture the whole user journey and highlight various connections between the steps. When working across different parts of your organisation, you know how difficult it is to keep communication at the right level and how useful it would be to have one, easy to understand tool with a clear vision of what users do, feel and need whilst using your product.
What you need
I believe every experience map is different and there’s no right or wrong way of doing it until it serves its purpose. But there are a few things worth looking into before you start:
Research
Make sure you have enough user research to base your experience map on. Without enough research, you will likely end up with idealised user journeys that reflect your own expectations. On the other hand, having too much to analyse can be troublesome, too. When I joined Zoopla, I was impressed with the quantity and variety of user research that was carried out in the past. It’s a great source of knowledge, but too extensive to be remembered by one person. In the end, we spend a lot of time summarising and deciding on which insights will add value to the map.
The North Star
Traditionally experience maps focus on current user journeys revealing pain points and opportunities for innovation. That was one of the reasons for creating our map but, not the only one. Zoopla is known as a property portal, but after we acquired uSwitch and Hometrack, amongst others, we are now much more than that. We are currently in a discovery phase, identifying digital products, services and experiences that will help people in finding their new home. Mapping how they solve problems in their property lifecycle right now is a significant step in that direction.
Whether you want to focus on the present or the future, define your goal in the very beginning and focus on it.
How we did it
The initial plan was to build the framework during two workshops with the product team and then start talking with the rest of the company. We didn’t predict how time-consuming prioritising the insights will be, not to mention bringing it all together into a logical framework. In the end, it took us three whole day workshops with a one-week break between them. This allowed us to get a fresh perspective and gather missing information.
What are the jobs to be done?
On day one we organised all relevant research and translated this into jobs to be done. There’s a great article by Alan Klement on the advantage of the JTBD framework over user stories but the reason why we use it is that it’s all about understanding users’ motivation instead of their demographic background. Because Zoopla’s target audience is enormous it’s beneficial to skip the “who” information and focus on “what” and “why”.
The goal was to identify patterns and a logical order to the journey. We initially started by looking at the end-to-end journey as a linear experience, but as we iterated the map, we realised that it’s actually a series of cyclical paths, happening over and over throughout adult life. Each journey is different, but contains many of the same elements. This gave us the inspiration to work with loops for the visualisation, rather than swimlanes.
The first approach looked like this:
The challenge was to make it understandable for everyone in the business.
How to decide what’s important?
A week later we worked in pairs on mapping out user’s action during each stage of the journey. This time we tried to understand the relationships between different stages of the property lifecycle: Is finding a property to rent any different from finding a property to buy? How about the moving process? Is it always the same? Does the buying process get any easier with your second property? We hoped to answer all these questions and more…
During the next two sessions each pair created detailed mini-experience maps for each stage:
And then we simplified to bring it all together:
What we have learned
Prioritising is key
Too many insights make unnecessary noise. Listing every detail of the user experience is not hard, the challenge starts when you try to connect the dots. Remember that goal you set in the very beginning? Stick to it. It’s easy to get sucked into endless discussions over different routes the user might follow. Pick a path and tell that story.
Make it simple
A good experience map doesn’t need to be explained. It should speak for itself. It’s tempting to use jargon and all those abbreviations, but at the end of the day, it is storytelling, not an academic tool. Something that people can easily take in and something that influences how they think about the role of the company.
Don’t get too precious about it
There was a moment when I just wanted to finish our work, put it on the wall and be proud of the result. The truth is, it’s a never-ending story. Journeys should be reviewed frequently to check if the product is improving as fast as planned. Moreover, user expectations are always shifting so you’ll change it all the time. Its nature is not defined and not final, but open and dynamic, and this makes it wonderful.
The result
Flexible framework
The system we came up with is a powerful, modular tool that can be arranged any way desired. Every part of the journey is a stand alone artefact so we can take chosen parts with us to any meeting.
Communication tool
As useful as it is for the product team it has much bigger value for the rest of the business. Rarely do all the teams in a company have the same understanding of what drives their users. Giving the opportunity to be actively involved in experience mapping helps them understand how important their role is in user’s experience. Often it’s the first time they’ve stepped away from their usual position to view the product from the user’s perspective. This new knowledge creates a strong motivation to change the look of the map in their day-to-day work.
The most important thing I learned creating the experience map is that it’s not about the final product but about the process itself. The opportunity to start the conversation with different parts of the business and understand how they perceive the product was a valuable experience. It allows us not only to promote and spread the user-centered approach but develop more meaningful relationships with different parts of the business.
Experience mapping is about all of us getting to know our users, understanding their needs and frustrations. Therefore, we can decide the best way to shift or pivot towards the optimal journey. That’s something worth a three-day workshop.